Joseph James O’Neill (Seosamh Ó Néill) is best known for his science fiction novel,
Land Under England(1935). Despite his relative obscurity today, however, his early speculative fiction inspired both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. O’Neill was an Irish writer, civil servant, and educationist whose contributions to literature and education left a lasting impact on Ireland and genre fiction. O’Neill was a colorful figure, referred to by his biographer M. Kelly Lynch as a “complex and polymorphous man” (“The Smiling Public Man” 4). She observes that his “entire life and his works were devoted to self discovery, and yet, inherent in a consistently contradictory nature, he threw up smoke screens with the intention of making himself dark to others” (5). For example,…
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Citation: Swank, Kris. "Joseph James O’Neill". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 June 2025 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=15393, accessed 17 July 2025.]
